When Pickles Are Your Life's Calling

The founder of pickle maker Rick's Picks describes what it takes to transform a hobby into a thriving business with national distribution

The Entrepreneur: Rick Field, 44

Background: In 2003, Field, a director and producer for veteran journalist Bill Moyers, left TV to turn his pickle-making hobby into a full-time business he named Rick's Picks (BusinessWeek.com, 11/21/05).

The Company: Inspired by the ethnic food fusion trend, Field began concocting nontraditional pickles using such flavors as coconut and dried cherries in his brine as well as devising innovative varieties of pickled cauliflower and string beans. Initially, Field gained a local following selling his wares at the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan and on his Web site. Culinary nods from New York magazine and Food & Wine soon followed. Now Rick's Picks sells a line of 11 different varieties of pickled foods to a number of stores across the country including Whole Foods (WFMI) and Dean & DeLuca.

Sales: In 2004, Rick's Picks earned $39,000, and the company estimates it will bring in $500,000 in 2007.

His Story: As a kid, some of the happiest times I had were during summers in Vermont, when my family spent evenings in the kitchen making pickles together and listening to the Red Sox on the radio. We have deep roots in the crafts culture of New England, and we made regional staples such as dilly beans, sliced dill pickles, and pickled green tomatoes. Those time in the kitchen left a real mark.

Cut to the late '90s. I was living in New York City and working in TV as a producer/director. Even though I had access to foods from all around the world, I missed those delicious pickles of my youth. An e-mail to the folks produced the secret master recipes for the family classics. I picked up produce at the local market, followed the recipes, and waited a couple of months for the pickling process to do its thing, then cracked open my first jar. Eureka! They tasted just like the old days. Over a four-year period I spent nearly every summer weekend making and refining pickle recipes until I had 18 in all.

I shared my experiments with friends and co-workers. They liked them, so I began to bring the pickles to birthday parties—an etched-glass Mason jar filled with pickled veggies got a much more positive reaction than a CD. But pickle-making probably would have remained a blissful hobby had I not, on a whim, entered the Rosendale (N.Y.) International Pickle Festival Contest in 2001. To my complete surprise, my Windy City Wasabeans (beans in a soy-wasabi brine) took home the big blue ribbon for Best in Show. The Wasabeans won again in 2002. I was onto something. I discovered pickles were more than a hobby: They were my vocation. I had never said to myself explicitly that I wanted to be a pickle entrepreneur, but this is where I found myself.

From Hobby to Business

A hobby is one thing, but a business, especially a first business, is something else entirely. And since my experience with the business of food was slight to say the least, I joined forces with Lauren McGrath, a friend with 20 years of professional culinary experience, and set out to commercialize my hobby. My kitchen's stovetop stockpot soon gave way to a 60-gallon steam kettle, and we experienced a number of enlightenments as we learned how to use a pH meter and became certified in acidified food preparation.

Some of the things that were fun about pickling as a hobby proved to be inefficient and costly in the business world. We discovered that those quaint etched-glass squared-off Mason jars didn't roll right in a labeling machine and had to be labeled by hand. No problem, we said, for the first 3,000 jars. But by jar 3,001, we were ready to switch to a less-detailed round jar that could be labeled by a machine.